Future Dave

Why do people keep saying that John McCain has an “expert” grasp of foreign policy? Every time McCain opens his mouth, he says something dangerously stupid, expecially about foreign policy.

I admit the guy was a war hero in Vietnam, but seriously, this man knows nothing about foreign policy.

When he makes bizarre statements about “the Iraq/Pakistan border” the media lets him slide. (No one at ABC bothered to inform him that Iraq and Pakistan do not even share a border, unless you count “Iran” as a “very wide border”.)

Yet when he makes an equally stupid statement that “Barack Obama said he would bomb Pakistan”, the media actually repeats it. That statement is every bit as wrong as the previous one, but McCain’s false allegations get coverage, while his false facts don’t.

At every campaign stop, McCain says “Barack Obama is wrong about Iraq”, and the media repeats it like McCain is some sort of foreign policy genius. Meanwhile, everything Obama has said about Iraq has turned out to be true, and everything McCain has said has turned out to be false. (McCain is like the Oracle of Crawford, who makes statements that are forceful and sincere-sounding, but always wrong.)
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This is a pop quiz for people who are not familiar with Orlando.  One of our local idiots is named Mike Meehan.  Mike is actually a Canadian citizen, but he decided a while back that he is still an American patriot, and that the best way to promote his website was to use the image of the twin towers burning.

As you might expect, anyone who is so despicable that he would use a picture of a mass murder to promote himself, he is also making money off it, by selling CDs. I have not listened to the CD, but I am told it is exactly what you would expect: a bunch of hate-filled lies set to music.

Here is the pop quiz part: Which of these pictures is accurate?

Is Mike a “liberal”, who is so blinded by his hatred of George Bush that he doesn’t realize that no one wants to hear his stupid music?  (If you are a liberal, would you agree that this is a suitable way to criticize George Bush?)

Or is Mike a “conservative”, who believes that the most appropriate way to spread his stupid opinions is with pictures of mass murder?  (If you are a conservative, would you agree that this is a proper way to criticize Bill Clinton?)

Why the difference? If someone who is despicable agrees with you, does that make his opinions seem less disgraceful?  

In my opinion, people who use revolting images to sell their CDs (or their ideas) are no better than the people who cheered the attacks.  In my opinion, if you think either sign is correct, then you should be wondering if you have any other vile and loathsome opinions.

If you think this is a valid means to express an opinion, then maybe now you understand why the Shi’ites and Sunni’s think their actions are reasonable.

So I get home from work, turn on the TV, and the first thing I hear is Lou Dobbs doing a ten-minute-long tirade against Barack Obama. First Lou rants that Obama only went to Iraq to boost his “so called credentials”, and then Lou attacks Obama for five minutes for not granting an interview to a reporter from the New Yorker, and Lou concludes with a survey that says “most people think the media treat Obama better than McCain.”

There was more, but my wife made me change the channel because I was yelling at the TV so much that she was worried the baby’s first sentence would be “TRUCK you, Lou Dobbs!” (He likes trucks.)

First of all, Lou Dobbs is more of a prostitute than a news journalist.  If I wanted someone to just say EXACTLY what his clients pay him to say, and act like he means it, Lou would be my first choice.  If I wanted someone who has been lying, cheating, evading, and twisting the truth for so long that he wouldn’t know accuracy if it bit him in the Ashcroft, I would definitely pick Lou, (Scotty McClellan keeps growing a conscience.)  If I wanted someone to report the truth, I would go to Comedy Central.

Second, Barack Obama is way smarter than you, Lou, you useless sack of partisan lies.  Your adolescent ideas about foreign policy “credentials” are even more worthless than your slanted opinions about medicine and your juvenile understanding of economics. Every time you open your dim-witted opinions to the world, you leave people less informed than they were when you started.

Barack Obama visited Iraq in January 2006, and his opinions are every bit as valid as John McCain’s.  (And more valid than your’s Lou.)  Obama talked to the exact same experts that McCain did, and came to a different conclusion.  Now Lou Dobbs and Joe Lieberbush is now running around the Republican after-dinner speaking circuit and saying that “Obama wouldn’t have been able to visit before the surge…”  Which is amazingly stupid, because Obama DID visit Iraq before the surge.

Third: The reason people think McCain is treated unfairly in the media is because LOU TELLS THEM THAT EVERY NIGHT. The coverage has been slanted against Obama for about ten weeks, but Lou can’t tell people that, so instead, Lou shows a poll asking uneducated people what they think. Hey Lou: Instead of asking unqualified people about their estimation of what the facts might be, a real journalist would actually do some research and find out these things called facts.

For example, if I asked a thousand people if they thought Lou Dobbs seemed like a homosexual prostitute, and half of then said “yes”, THAT WOULD NOT BE NEWS.  A REAL journalist would actually do this thing called “research”, and then would report this result called “information”.  (I am putting these words in quote marks because apparently you have never heard them before.)
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The Conference Board data has been garbage for so long that no one even looks at it anymore. The Conference Board bases its opinions on a survey of something like 18,000 CEOs. The opinions of the CEOs are then run through an economist (or possibly a Ouija Board) to insure that the responses are sufficiently random.

To give you an example of how the Conference Board thinks, the headline of the July 10 survey was “CEO Confidence Holds Steady”. This is accurate, I suppose, because CEOs were wildly pessimistic in the first quarter, and they continued to be wildly pessimistic in the second quarter. Anything below 50 on their scorecard is the sign of a declining business cycle. So, for example, the composite score of 39 in the second quarter is higher than the Great Depression, but lower than anything that should have the word “steady” attached to it.

If your car was tumbling down a hill, would you call that a “steady” decline? If you were unemployed last quarter, and are still unemployed, would you say that your unemployment rate was “stable”?

So anyway, people pay attention to the Conference Board in much the same way that we pay attention to Ted Koppel. Every once in a while, we notice they are still alive, but we just don’t care.
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Now I don’t want to call Phil Gramm stupid… No, wait, I take that back. The man IS stupid. He is dumber than Dan Quayle on a good day, and dumber than a paper sack full of hammers the rest of the time.
Here is my proof:

1.    Phil Gramm had to repeat three grades in school.
       And this was in Texas, where you don’t even need
       to show up.
2.    In 1983, when Gramm changed parties, he had to
       run a campaign against himself.   The main accomplishment
       he pointed to was that he helped Reagan pass the 1982 budget,
       which even David Stockman called “a complete fabrication.”
3.    In 1990 Phil Gramm fought a fierce battle to allow the U.S.
       government to ignore human rights objections in our dealings
       with Saddam Hussein, on the basis that sanctions might hurt
       Halliburton and other U.S. businesses.
4.    In 2000, when Gramm’s wife was on the Board of Directors at
       Enron, Gramm pushed the “Commodity Futures” act that allowed
       Enron to follow the same responsibility and reporting guidelines
       as a Roman orgy.
5.    In 2007, while Gramm was a senior economic advisor to John
       McCain’s presidential campaign, Gramm was being paid by UBS
       to lobby on behalf of weaker banking regulations.   This is not a�
       typo: WEAKER banking regulations.
6.    On July 9, 2008, Gramm said that the U.S. was not in a recession,
       and that Americans are a bunch of “whiners”.  Even though John
       McCain rejected the comments, Gramm stood by his statement.

Let’s face it, this is a pattern of stupidity. At his best, he shows a remarkable lack of insight into the consequences of his own actions. At worst, this is a man who makes the same mistakes over and over, expecting to get different results.

Here is the worst part: Gramm is the one person in Washington who knows less about economics than John McCain, and he is the senior economic advisor to John McCain.

This is even more troublesome, because McCain is starting to show signs of declining mental functions. Twice in the last two months, he has referred to Czechoslovakia as if it currently exists. Twice in the past year, he has publicly confused Shiites and Sunnis.  And his policy on Iraq withdrawal changes sometimes right in the middle of a speech.

McCain is running on his foreign policy experience, and the media refuses to report the fact that he knows nothing about foreign policy.

McCain admits that he knows nothing about economics, and the media refuses to cover that as well.
Now it appears that his top advisors are even more clueless and befuddled than McCain, and the media refuses to cover it.

So here are the things you will not hear in the media this week:
1.   The United States is in a recession. The Bureau of Labor Statistics�
      has been covering it up by fudging the numbers.
2.   Tax cuts are NOT the solution to every economic problem.
3.   Free markets are a good thing, but they need to be regulated.�
      When you refuse to regulate a market such as mortgages, the
      abuses can take down the entire system.
4.   Phil Gramm is wrong about the economy, and about so many
      other things that it is hard to count.   If you are looking to him
      to shore up McCain’s economic confusion, you are in trouble.

�

1.     A Presidential Candidate mentions that Americans are bitter, and that they cling to guns and religion because their lives are so needy.

2.     A Presidential candidate says that Social Security is a disgrace, because “We are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers.”

Both statements contain an element of truth, and both statements tell us something about how the candidate thinks.  Both statements let us know what kind of policies the candidate would pursue as President.

The news media asked both candidates about the statements afterwards, and both of them changed the wording a little but repeated the original mistake.  (If you are writing a snarky web commentary, you really can’t get much better than that.)

The first candidate understands how destitute many Americans have become, but does not understand the gun culture, or our need for religion.  Clearly, this is a candidate who wants to regulate guns, and believes in domestic spending for social programs.  (If you are reading with your racist glasses on: “Clearly, this candidate is Black.”)

The second candidate understands that Congress is raiding Social Security, but doesn’t understand that the fault is with Congress, not Social Security.  Clearly, this is a candidate who wants to privatize Social Security.

The first item received national news coverage for two weeks, and still continues to be used to label the candidate an “elitist”.  The second item has already disappeared from the news cycle.

Both statements should have led to an uproar, but there was only one uproar that I remember.  (And don’t you pretend that was an uproar over that second comment.  I Googled both statements in great detail, and found more than ten times as much coverage in the mass media for the first comment as for the second. )

Here is my favorite part: The first candidate was later bludgeoned into admitting that his comments were “insensitive”.  The second candidate (without any prompting from me) actually posted a graph on his website to show that the statement he made was incorrect, and why his proposed solution won’t work. 

If you are writing a snarky web commentary, it really doesn’t get any better than that.

but I will try.   I am an Accountant, so Lord knows, I am not
the funniest guy around, but I know funny when I see it.

Here is an example:

   Funny:
    - Known to be sarcasm by everyone.
    - Witty
    - Easily understood
    - Not tied to any specific event or date
    - Whimsical and spontaneous
    - References to a famous landmark and view.

See; even if you didn’t laugh, you may have smiled a bit.
Now for the opposite example:

   Unfunny
    - Known to be sarcasm by only 50% of Americans.
    - Not witty.
    - Easily misunderstood
    - Tied to a specific event that already left the news cycle.
    - Vicious and anti-American
    - References to a famous murderer and hatred.

Now I don’t want to be the guy to tell an unfunny magazine
how to sell more unfunny magazines,  but did you laugh?
Did you smile?   Or did you cringe?

If the magazine had depicted George Bush and John McCain sitting down with Osama bin Laden to plan another mass murder of Americans, would you have found it more entertaining?

Seriously.  I live out here in the parts of the world that were
left off that first picture.  The reason New Yorkers tend to
ignore us is that about 50% of all  the people in my area
DO NOT UNDERSTAND that a burning American flag is funny.

Yesterday, I heard Jon Stewart explaining that this is just satire, and that I need to get a sense of humor.  I disagree.  Rush Limbaugh gets on the air every day and lies for two or three hours.  When people catch him in a lie, he always says: “It was satire.”  

But I have heard my friends repeat the things that Rush Limbaugh said, five years later, as if they read it in the Bible.  When I explain to them that it was a satire (lie) from an oxycontin addict, they claim to have read it in the New York Times, meaning it is a liberal conspiracy. 

I hereby propose my double-standard for satire:  If only Republicans know you are lying, then you can call it “satire”.  If only Democrats know you are lying, then you have to run a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen.  (If it is a radio show, then you have to use a laugh-track. )

Example:
Satire: “Al Gore should be elected President, maybe even Vice-President”.
         [See, even Republicans know this is funny:  He was elected President.]
Not Satire: “McCain has a perfect voting record on veteran’s affairs.”
         [See, Republicans have no idea that veterans groups give him a D minus.]

Yeesh.  Explaining funny to these people is like showing a card trick to a dog.

I was sent an article a few weeks ago by Cal Thomas. It was the usual collection of snide remarks about Barack Obama, but I never did respond to it. I have not written any letters, or even bothered to call Cal Thomas names.

It is hard to say why I didn’t resort to personal attacks, because I am fairly good at it.  In addition, Cal was completely wrong about almost everything.  I suppose it is because I don’t particularly hate Cal Thomas. (If it were from Jonah Goldberg, for example, I could dismiss it by pointing out that the man has some sort of terrible disease-induced brain damage, and that it would be tasteless to make fun of him.)

Also, I don’t think Cal Thomas believes what he is saying.  I think he says it because he wants to shock people and make money.  But deep down, I think Cal Thomas knows that the ideals he preaches are empty and false.

So let me take a minute to respond as carefully and clearly as the original argument was made.

In the very first sentence, Cal Thomas claims to know the beliefs of Barack Obama.  This is the classic definition of a character smear.  In a news report, for example, someone might report that “Barack Obama has proposed increased taxes on people making over $300,000 per year.”  In a character smear, though, someone would report WHY Barack Obama made the proposal.  It is fundamentally unfair, of course: Cal Thomas cannot read minds.

For example, I once reported that George Bush wakes up every day and thinks to himself: “What can I do that will cause the most permanent damage to the United States?” This is a character smear.  Even though his actions seem to indicate his thoughts, I actually have no idea what Bush thinks, or even IF he thinks. (Since then I have learned from reliable sources that he is actually trying to do the most possible damage to the entire world.)

Anyway, back to the article.

Cal Thomas was able to read Obama’s mind because Obama once pointed out that the gains from economic growth skew heavily toward the wealthy.  Cal disagrees with this, of course, and said that gains go toward anyone who works hard and makes good decisions.  This is simply not true.

Certainly we teach our children that hard work and good decisions lead to success, but it is not true.  In America, success might come from hard work, or it might come from a lucky break.  Failure might come from laziness, or it might come from a medical bill that wasn’t covered by insurance.  There are plenty of people who are desperately poor, and working so hard they can’t even take the time off to get a better education.  There are also plenty of rich people who are working hardly at all.

But the thing that disproves his argument is simple statistics.  More wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top 500 people than any time since the 1920’s.  Same is true of the top thousand, or two thousand, or any number you care to name.  Is this because they all work so hard?

In the years after World War 2, peaking in 1960, America’s middle class led the biggest economic boom in the history of the world.  Today, barely 40 years later, the middle class has lost all the ground they gained in the 1960’s, and then lost another 40 years before that.  In fact, the last time so much wealth was controlled by so few people, Calvin Coolidge was President.

In the 1960’s, the average CEO make 26 times what the average worker made.  This formula allowed workers to send their children to college, and to get ahead by sheer force of will and hard work.  Today, the average CEO makes 300 times what the average worker makes.  Last year, the average worker got a 3.2% raise, and the average CEO got a 395% raise.

This institutional wealth has allowed the creation of a permanent upper class.  The people at the top of the income streams are now getting all the benefits, and are sharing less with the “hard workers” than any time since the Great Depression.

Are they working 300 times harder?  The answer is no.  Statistically, they are working about 12% more than average, and about 12% less than middle management.

Are they making 300 times better decisions?  Hardly.  American corporations are short-sighted money-losing machines that notoriously pay just as well for failures as for achievers.  Some of the most spectacular bankruptcies in the history of the world have occurred in just the last few years.  Almost all of the largest business failures were attributed to corruption, mismanagement, and stupidity.  Kenneth Lay, who was paid over $100 million a year as President of the amazingly corrupt ENRON Corporation, admitted at his trial that he had no idea how the company worked.  In fact, that was his defense.

Cal Thomas tells us that success is just a matter of hard work. That was true once, and is still true of “middle income”, but in the vast majority of cases, it is simply not true of “success”.  The largest successes these days comes from knowing the right people, or just being lucky.

The next thing Cal Thomas said is that Obama’s policy is wealth redistribution, and said it is the same policy that was at the heart of the Soviet Union.  This is also completely and utterly false.

The top marginal tax rates under Obama will go back from 35% to 39.6%.  Anyone who believes this was the heart of the Soviet System (average tax rate: 100%) is simply unaware why the Soviet Union failed.  Here is the odd part: Cal Thomas is smart. Why would he make a statement that completely false. The fact of the matter is that he was lying, and he knew it.  

OK, so here is my comparable statement: “Cal Thomas got famous by blackmailing an executive at NBC.  He never worked hard, and only earned his money through deceit and fraud.”  Did that get you mad?  Would it have worked if I had said “Cal Thomas is really secretly black.” 

Incidentally, the top marginal tax rate in 1950 through 1963 was 91%. Was America socialist back then? Hardly. America was the biggest wealth-generation machine on planet Earth.  From World War II until Ronald Regan, the LOWEST tax rate for top millionaires was 70%.  Ronald Reagan ran the top rate down to 50% - It tripled the deficit.  I don’t remember anyone complaining that 50% was a socialist tax rate.

When George Bush ran the rates down to 35%, it created the largest deficit in the history of the world. America has gone from a creditor nation to a debtor nation in just a few short years.  Today, we are borrowing a billion dollars a day from China to pay for our tax cuts, and Cal Thomas believes that anything less is “income redistribution”.

If the government was required to use the same kind of accounting that corporations use, the national debt would be 57 trillion dollars.  Make no mistake, most of that money went to income redistribution.  Some of it was distributed downward, but most was distributed upward.

When George Bush proposed the tax cuts, he wrote the law to be temporary.  If he had written the cuts to be permanent, the cost would have been 5 trillion dollars.  In order to avoid that number, the cuts were written to be temporary.

Now, Cal Thomas says that unless we spend the entire $5 trillion on tax cuts, we are “subsidizing people for making wrong decisions.”  He could not possibly believe that.

Cal Thomas believes America was built on a “can do” spirit, and that Barack Obama is encouraging a “can’t do” spirit.  But his arguments are overwhelmingly wrong.  America was not built by slapping down people who fail, America was built by lifting those people up and offering them opportunity.

Not a handout, just an opportunity.  Not a free lunch, just a promise that if you work hard, you will make enough money to buy lunch.  Maybe a promise that your employer can’t cut your insurance and retirement to pay the CEO an extra million.  That would be nice.  No Socialism required that I can see.

Cal Thomas repeatedly uses phrases like “Obama and his legion of envious thieves…” This is disgraceful language, and shames anyone who believes it.  Yes, there are people who are poor because of their own mistakes.  But no, I do not believe we should let those people starve, or even treat them as thieves.  They are foolish, or lazy, or maybe just unlucky.  But if we can’t lift them up, then it says more about us than about them.

Increasingly, Cal Thomas speaks for the Republican Party.  They offer no solutions for America’s economic crisis, for the environment, for the war, for the corruption in the Justice Department, for the failure of American corporations, or even for the education system.  The only ideas they offer are slogans that have failed for the last eight years.

They believe more inequality will encourage people to work harder.  They believe more drilling will encourage people to use less oil.  They believe more hand-picked partisans will solve the problem of hand-picked partisans.  They believe more aggression will solve the problems created by belligerence.  They believe more tax cuts will solve the problems created by tax cuts.  In short, they think you can borrow your way out of debt.

If Cal Thomas actually believes this garbage, then he is wrong, and it is time someone said so to his face.

Deep down, I think Cal Thomas knows that the slogans in his columns are empty and false.  But we need to stop those slogans before they destroy the country.

America was not built on “doing things the easy way.”  America was built “standing up for what is right”, even when it is unpopular.  To me, that is what makes John McCain un-American.

When the Supreme Court ruled that you could not hold someone indefinitely without charges, did John McCain stand up for the Constitution?  No.  He called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country” and he promised to appoint more ratbrain judges to overturn it. I am absolutely not making that up. John McCain promised that he will overturn habeas corpus.

This is serious. We need a President who stands up to the crowd when the crowd is wrong. John McCain is not that man.

Many, many years ago, he may have been the kind of guy who would do something unpopular just because it was the right thing to do. But apparently he gave that up during the 2000 election, and hasn’t looked back.

John McCain once experienced torture first-hand, but he voted twice in the Senate to allow torture, because torture seems to be popular these days. If slavery was still popular, John McCain would own a slave or two.

When one of the Presidential Candidates promises that he will help overturn the most fundamental human right, because it isn’t popular right now, that is un-American.

He is a dangerous man, and he can’t be trusted to be President.

Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the author of at least two books about the relationships between the United States and Latin America. On TomDispatch.com, Grandin offers some of the best insight into the politics of Latin America so far this year.
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When you are choosing a friend, an employee, or a spouse, nothing is more important than character.

When you are choosing a President, character is important, but you might want to consider shopping for intelligence as well.

Bill Clinton is brilliant, but he has character flaws. For example, he balanced the Federal budget in the same year he was cheating on his wife.

Because of Clinton’s problems, the Republicans have positioned all their recent candidates as “men of character”. This tactic has worked, in spite of being mostly false, because of the massive advertising budget.

George Bush was advertised as a “compassionate conservative”, even though he is quick to anger, and slow to forgive. He was advertised as someone who would surround himself with advisors, even though in real life, he is much too arrogant to seek the advice of peacemakers.

George Bush was advertised as a “uniter not a divider”, even though in real life, he has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish his political enemies in word and deed.

Certainly George Bush must have some character strengths: He is loyal to his friends, and he is steadfast, for example. But the GOP advertising machine always promotes him as a paragon of compassion, forgiveness and prudence, which are plainly missing from his character.

In much the same way, the GOP machine manages to attack Democrats where they are insufferably strong: They convinced the media that Al Gore is a liar, even though he is one of the most honest men ever to run for President. The convinced the media that John Kerry was a coward, even though he had won medals for bravery under fire.

Now the media machine is trying to sell us John McCain as a man of principle, even though it is his main weakness. And they are trying to convince us that Barack Obama is a man with stale ideas, even though his ideas are largely untested, almost experimental.

The economists and political scientists will tell you about Obama’s ideas. I want to talk about John McCain’s character.

First: Just because no one likes you, it doesn’t mean you are a “maverick”. It might just mean that you are a belligerent self-centered bastard.

Second: If you continue dating the whole time you are married to your first wife, it doesn’t mean that you had a momentary lapse in your character. If you dump your wife when you meet someone younger, prettier, and richer, it usually just means you are a turd.

Third: If you make jokes about Chelsea Clinton being ugly, it doesn’t mean you are funny, it usually just means you are shallow and mean-spirited.

Fourth, if you graduate near the bottom of your class, and only graduate school at all because your dad is an Admiral, you are not really in a good position to be making fun of a guy who graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School.

Fifth, if your health care plan is a hodgepodge of tax cuts, propaganda and outright lies, you can’t really claim to be “straight talker”.  

Certainly John McCain does have character strengths: He endured captivity in Viet Nam with selfless patriotism. But he is not a man of principle, he is not a man of character, he is not a straight talker, and he is not a particularly smart guy.

When you are picking a friend, character is the most important factor. Don’t just ask your friend if they are honest, for example, watch them.

When you are picking an employee, look for someone with good character. Don’t just ask them if they are reliable, for example, find out if they talk about you behind your back.

When you are picking a spouse, nothing is more important than character. Don’t just ask them if they are loyal, observe if they are faithful in their other commitments.

When you are picking a President, don’t just listen to advertisements about someone’s character or intelligence. Watch, research, observe. If you make a decision based on a slogan or a lapel pin, then you are asking to be misled.

Habeas Corpus is what makes the United States a “free” country. If you take Habeas out of the Constitution, we would no longer be “the land of the free,” for example, we would be the land of “Sit down and Shut Up.”) *

Two months after 9/11, President Bush wrote a military order that said the executive branch could arrest anyone they suspect of being a terrorist, transport them anywhere in the world, hold them indefinitely without charges, torture them without consequence, convict them without a court hearing, and execute them without entitlement to a lawyer.

You might think I am kidding, but that is almost exactly what it says.

Naturally, the “Bush Doctrine” was ruled to be unconstitutional the first time it came to trial, by Judge James Robertson (to avoid confusion, I will just call him “Hero of Freedom”).

Bush was furious. Not only did Bush start a campaign to slander “Hero of Freedom”, but he may have forced “Hero of Freedom” to resign from the FISA court. In addition, the rumor is that Bush promised a Supreme Court seat to John Roberts (to avoid confusion, I will just call him “Ratbrain”) if he would overturn the “Hero of Freedom” ruling.

The day after Ratbrain voted to overturn the “Hero of Freedom” ruling, Bush nominated Ratbrain to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Above is an undoctored photo of ratbrain dancing with the torturer-in-chief.

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Because of newspapers throughout the rest of the world, we now know that as much as $23 billion dollars was lost or stolen in Iraq. (Given what we know of human nature, you can be pretty sure it was stolen.)

News organizations in the U.S. aren’t even reporting it.

But I am fairly shallow - I am just upset because no one has gone to jail.

The Pentagon has published over 8000 pages proving that they used illegal propaganda to mislead the American public. This is big news throughout the rest of the world, but no major news organization in the U.S. has covered the story.

But I am just ticked off because no one has gone to jail.
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Wow, this is good news. I owe $100 thousand to my bank, but no one seriously expects me to pay up, so the “market value” of my loan (from the bank’s point of view) is really only $80 thousand.

Not only is the bank required to recognize the $20 thousand loss, but I can recognize the $20 thousand gain! My own financial mismanagement, illiquidity, and general failure to live up to my obligations is now a profit center.

What’s more, if I continue to deteriorate, I can recognize more income each year.

Morgan Stanley alone has realized $1.7 billion in “profit” by admitting that no one seriously expects them to pay their own debt. (If they survive long enough to pay off their own obligations, they will just have to recognize the loss as another unfortunate consequence of continued existence.)

My only regret is that I don’t have a CEO that I can pay a big “negligence” bonus.
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I keep hearing people say that things are not as bad now as they were under Carter.

To be fair and balanced: “Wrong.”

Unemployment:
When Carter took office, the unemployment rate was 7.7%. He got it down only a little: The average unemployment rate during his administration was 6.6%.  The BLS and other unreliable sources will tell you that unemployment right now is 5.5% or so.  But if we were to measure unemployment the way we did in the Carter Administration, the current number would be 14%.
That’s about twice what it was in the Carter Administration.
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